joint response, he said, with a certain hardy gayety:
"And when is he coming?"
"Oh, any moment!" Lillias said, with a rueful little smile full of gladness at his light daring. " That is, if one can judge from his already being here before me. I suppose I may say that it wasn't his fault that we are not here on our wedding journey."
She turned from her uncle to her aunt in making this observation, and Mrs. Crombie met it in the same spirit. "Well, Lillias, I must say that you have done very wisely in the whole matter. I should never have forgiven myself if any fancied inconvenience to us had kept you from coming to us in such an emergency; and no matter how it turns out, I shall write to Aggie that you have done everything that a girl could do."
"Thank you. Aunt Hester," and the two women had a moment of mothering and daughtering in which Crombie could not join them.
" Well, I am prepared to do anything you want," he said, with an ironical ease, and a genuine interest in the affair which he thought it more manly to conceal. "Do I understand that Mr. Craybourne will ask for me again?"
"Yes, indeed!" the girl said. "We are not out there now, and he knows it."
"And what am I to say, when he asks to see you — if he does?"
Lillias looked at her aunt, who visibly failed to formulate a line of conduct for Crombie, and then she looked back at him, and said, caressingly, "Oh, just trust to the inspiration of the moment, uncle."
"Then you leave it all to me?"
"Quite."
"Well, I've never had the chance of forbidding a young man my house before, and perhaps I sha'n't do it in just the way that this Mr. Craybourne is used to, but I think I can do it effectually."
Crombie wore the mustache of his period branching into the side whiskers of the early eighteen-sixties, and it was with a fine flare of both that he now tilted his head on one side and waited for his wife and niece to precede him out of the breakfast-room. His beard and the gossamer traces of his hair were faded from their earlier red to an agreeable yellowish white, and his bulging blue eyes matched very well with them and with a complexion of ancestral Scotch floridity, so that as he stood leaning forward with his thumbs in his waistcoat-pockets he was such a fine elderly Du Maurier military type that Lillias could hardly forbear throwing him a kiss. She did forbear, but she forbore with a backward roll of her own eyes which had all the effect of a thrown kiss. "You'll be splendid. Uncle Archie, whatever you do," she encouraged him, though it made him tremble, almost, to see her put her arm round her aunt's waist. He felt that she might carry it too far in constituting herself Mrs. Crombie's protegee, and in fact he fancied Mrs. Crombie's waist tacitly stiffening under the caress.
To make sure, he asked her, when Lillias had gone up to her room for a moment, "Then you've changed your mind about her?"
"Not at all!" his wife returned, in the scorn often used by women to give dignity to a misstatement. " I feel exactly as I did, though in an entirely different way. She is not underhanded, but overhanded, and she thinks that if she is perfectly transparent, I shall not see through her. All is, I shall have to fight her in the open."
"Where did you get that expression?" Crombie parleyed.
"I don't know: in some of those English South African accounts. You know what I mean. She is determined to be married from this house."
Crombie caught his breath, and then whistled.
"I can see it," she went on, "as plain as the nose on my face. But I can tell her she won't do it, without my knowing it."
" I wish I knew what you meant by that," Crombie sighed.
"Well, you will see."
Just then Lillias's trailing skirts were heard on the stairs like the drift of fallen leaves down a forest path.
IV
MR. CRAYBOURNE, whatever were his impulses to an earlier call, had quelled them so far as not to come before eleven o'clock in the morning, though why he should have come before the afternoon can be explained only on the ground that the country informality and the summer heat had relaxed him to a social freedom which he might not otherwise have permitted himself. When he did come, however, he was not relaxed to the extreme of asking for Miss Bellard. He asked for Mr. Crombie, and he was shown to him in the library, a room that few men could have had so little need of as the master of the house. It had some books, mostly disheveled paper copies of novels, tumbling about on its shelves; and it was stuck round with Crombie's sketches on pasteboard and canvas, memories of The Surges and its scenery, and forecasts of the White Mountain landscape, and bits of the Saco valley. Crombie was so old-fashioned in his methods that these attempts were like rejected studies by poorer masters of the extinct White Mountain school. He was ranging among them, trying, with his mouth puckered to an inaudible whistle, to make choice of someone or other that might be carried farther, when Mr. Craybourne rang. Crombie had almost forgotten about him, but he now started into a sense of him that took all nature out of his careless ease. He came forward, however, with outstretched hand, and welcomed him. He said, "Ah, how do you do, Mr. Craybourne?" in a tone of expectation that struck upon his own ear as not quite the thing; and he did not know whether he mended matters much or not by adding, "Sorry not to have been at home when you called yesterday. Sit down."
"Oh, thank you, thank you," Mr. Craybourne said, and after faltering a moment on foot he folded himself down and down, by what appeared to Crombie successive plications, into the rather low chair appointed him. The result of the process brought his face somewhat more on a level with Crombie's, who was himself of such a good height that he was at least not used to being towered over, and who saw that Mr. Craybourne's face was a decidedly handsome, tanned face, regular in feature, with rather deep-set blue eyes, and a skin burnished on the cheeks, chin, and upper lip by the very close shave which the barber at the Saco Shore House had just given him. He diffused, involuntarily, as Crombie decided, a faint and fainter odor of the bay-rum which he had not been quick enough to keep the barber from dabbling him with after the close shave; and he also seemed to have a good deal of wrist, from which, on the right and left, he nervously clasped his hat with slender, gentlemanly hands. His hands had been liberated from the labor of the fields by the failure of his ranching experiment so long as to have lost the brown of the sun and wind, but they had the tone of his complexion. The clasp he had given Crombie was soft, yet firm, and not at all damp, in spite of the nervousness that brought some perspiration to the young man's straight, comely forehead.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек,
